Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm not entirely sure how to categorize this one. It's hardly a "courtroom procedural", as it's far from typical court procedure. It's a bit of a "whodunnit", but your options are limited from the beginning. But mostly it's a lot of unlikeable characters bulldogging through a trial to come to the truth.

None of the characters are very likable. Josie, the protagonist, is a whiner. She does her job, gets a client (who she believes is innocent) off a murder charge, and then throws her career away when the woman turns out really to be a murderer. Josie's love interest, Archer, handles confrontation by retreating (perhaps understandably, but it doesn't make him any more likeable); her supposed partner, Faye, doesn't want her practising the kind of law she knows Josie is good at; the girl accused of murder doesn't want to be liked; the victim was a creep; his son is a victim of child abuse who turns into a creep; and the accused's mother—and wife of the son—is the biggest creep of the lot.

I Am Not A Lawyer™, but many of the courtroom scenes don't ring true to me—and at least one reviewer who is a lawyer agreed.

There are really only three possibilities for the killer, and Forster commits the cardinal sin in a mystery writer of telling us that somebody else did it. Misleading the reader is good; lying to the reader—not so much.